IIT-Gandhinagar would join hands with other institutes like Pune’s Deccan College, Chennai-based Sharma Centre for Heritage Education and MS University, amongst others to develop synergy on R&D, and to offer a national facility eventually for conducting cutting edge research in the area of Archaeology.

“A small initiative has been taken to establish an R&D centre on archaeology here, in this direction. We shall be working in coordination with other varsities and institutes,” IIT-Gandhinagar is reported to have told PTI, adding, that it is important to protect our past.

IIT-Gandhinagar will collaborate with these institutes in the next few months, for which preliminary work has already begun.

The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), Mysore, has a branch that works on deciphering text or languages discovered from ancient sites called-Epigraphy.

In a bid to revive archaeological practices by providing a technological interface, IIT-Gandhinagar has proposed to start offering few post doctoral fellowships to archaeologists and commence a minor programme on Archaeology from the next academic session.